One more question, aimed mostly at JR, that seems to summarize alot of the discussion here about inclusion and community types:
Are multiculturalism and resilience compatible?
Is it possible to create a tribal identity purely out of the idea of material security, self-reliance and localism, irrespective of other cultural inclusion/exclusion categories like religion and race? I say this because tribalism and group identity are difficult to engender without historical memory, as is creating a whole new ethos without bootstrapping existing identities/tribalisms.
It seems many readers of this site favor incorporating an Resilience ethos into their existing group affinities.

I think Kievsky has already addressed this in his various writings, but I’ll follow his lead.

I think if you get a community truly focused on material security, self-reliance, and localism, you’re imposing about as much cognitive and behavioral hegemony as a standard religion. Maybe you don’t call it a “religion,” and certainly you don’t have to chant incantations, but you’re forming a tribe and drawing a border around them.

Tom Chittum wisely said that as soon as a community draws a border around itself, it has asserted local authority. If you start a group that believes in localism, you are necessarily building a castle wall and shutting out the globalists.

Even if you have a totally diverse network, if it’s localized, it’s a network inside a castle wall – a walled city, if you will.

If you are unambiguously part of a tightly-knit group, you can’t pick and choose. You’re part of the tribe. Your fellows might annoy you – but you can’t get rid of them, and they can’t get rid of you. When you get old and grey, you’ll still be part of the tribe.

CF wrote:

However, many of us have lived among multiple ethnic/religious communities through their life and genuinely value diversity; is such a worldview doomed amid increased social fragmentation?
Personally, I think the liberal/libertarian ideal of social tolerance/acceptance is something worth preserving; it seems to me that Resilience is more of a socio-economic arrangement than a cultural one.
Many of the people I know would jump on the chance to live a more localized life, but have no interest in joining some in-group that will enforce some rigid and binding standard of identity; it subverts the very spirit of individualism that makes open societies great.

Let’s take homosexuality as an example.

If the community is exclusively pro-gay, then that’s rigid; if the community is exclusively anti-gay, that’s also rigid.

Can you really have a small community that tolerates both pro-gay and anti-gay elements? I don’t think it’s possible.

You might be able to enforce “don’t ask, don’t tell” and insist that gays stay in the closet and gay-haters refrain from identifiable acts of anti-gay violence.

You might be able to get a group of people that truly doesn’t care about homosexual rights – i.e., they won’t lift a finger to help gays, but they also won’t bother to hurt them.

The homosexuality example can be extended to just about any divisive issue.

I don’t think genuine tolerance of diversity is compatible with any small or tightly-knit community.

Genuine tolerance seems to be awfully close to indifference. You might have a network of people who tolerate each other because they don’t have to pay attention to each other, but as soon as people notice each other, they will start judging each other.

If you have lived in large, anonymous communities, you have probably experienced a lot of tolerance, because there’s a lot of anonymity and indifference. In a big network like that, no one is important to anyone else; everyone is “Bowling Alone” as Putnam would have it.

If everyone is tolerant, then everyone can choose whatever he likes best. And that means that no one is obligated to be close to you. They might tolerate you, but they don’t have to make you part of their tribe.

When you get old and grey, will tolerant people still choose to like you? Will your tolerant children come and visit? Will you even have children if you tolerated childlessness as a lifestyle choice?

CF wrote:

Additionally, pulling back into some cloistered racially/culturally homogenous seems in direct contradiction to the spirit of expansive social networking upon which resilience will almost sure be built. In fact, I think this distinction between networks and fortresses is important, and could represent the difference between success and failure in this century.

I doubt very much that “expansive social networking” relates to resilience much. A farming village, where each household takes care to treat its neighbors well, is resilient. It’s not expansive; it’s conformist. People all have compatible world-views; they tend to “drink the Kool-Aid” of a common belief system.

So long as Chicago is getting shipments of food and energy, Chicago can afford to support an overclass of organized coercers. These coercers can give every ethnic group its own neighborhood. Those ethnic groups can be little closed castles ideologically, but can buy food from outsiders without any real emotional contact. Periodically, every little ethnic group can have a little parade, and everyone will talk about how lucky they are to live in a diverse, multicultural city with lots of ethnic restaurants. And if the people in the Irish neighborhood notice that the people in the Somali neighborhood are cutting the clitorises off their girls, the Irish don’t form a vigilante street gang – the Irish call the organized coercers, who might send Child Protective Services.

If Kievsky is correct, multiculturalism is a very expensive form of organized coercion. If the modern world were to collapse, perhaps postapocalyptic Chicago could not afford to maintain organized coercionists, with specialized Child Protective Services units. Perhaps the postapocalyptic Irish would form street gangs and shoot at the postapocalyptic Somali street gangs.

At this point, I would like to review the movie Prayer of the Rollerboys, but I find that film so remarkably repulsive that I still can’t watch more than a few minutes of it at a stretch.

Japan is and has been in a rut for the past decade. Between the slowly aging population, economic stagnation, high levels of public debt, and the ever growing NEET problem, it feels like Japan is experiencing a torrent of problems that aren’t really getting any better. The general population hasn’t turned a blind eye to it either, and they definitely perceive one of the biggest problems to be the rising number of NEETs in Japan. With around 90% of the population saying that it’s a serious problem,
…This last year, the total number of NEETs grew again to something like 620,000, and although the problem has been overshadowed by the economic crisis, it’s still a very real concern. There’s a wide variety of opinions out there, but the debate is ongoing as to why this problem exists in Japan, and exactly what can be done to stop it.

Don’t read that article if you don’t want to be “spoiled” for a bunch of anime.

“Those who live alone and have no friends tend to be isolated from society,” said Katsuhiko Fujimori, manager and chief research associate of social policy at Mizuho Information and Research Institute.
“A lot of young people, especially men, came to big cities to work during the period of postwar economic growth, and now they are old and alone” because they are unmarried or their partner died, he said. “They might have wanted a free lifestyle, escaping from a close-knit community. But now that they’re old, they can’t live alone, especially if they need nursing care.”
…
Long hours on the job prevented men from attaining a work-life balance, and this has led to isolation after they retire, he said.

So there you have the modern world in a nutshell. Japan, a country favored with some of the smartest humans on the planet, has abandoned its young people to poverty, and allows the old to grow old alone. If a hundred people die in Tokyo, two of them will be dying alone, forgotten by the community. (And frankly, that sounds pretty good, so long as they’ve got plenty of painkillers. Who wants to die in a crowded house full of screaming kids, or a boring nursing home?)

Tolerance is glamorous as long as you’re young and horny and good-looking. That might last five years or fifteen years.

If you survive youth without dying violently, you get to live a long time, getting uglier as you go. Even if your community tolerates various colors and religions, does it tolerate ugly septuagenarians?

The natural end of tolerance is kodokushi, dying alone, childless, socially irrelevant.

Date 12 June 2010
RISK OF GLOBAL CLIMATE CHANGE BY BP OIL SPILL
Gianluigi Zangari
Frascati National Laboratories (LNF) – National Institute of Nuclear Physics (INFN)
Frascati 00044, Via E. Fermi, 40, ITALY
Correspondence to: Gianluigi Zangari Email: gianluigi.zangari@lnf.infn.it
Abstract: BP Oil Spill may cause an irreparable damage to the Gulf
Stream global climate thermoregulation activity.
The Gulf Stream importance in the global climate thermoregulation processes
is well assessed. The latest real time satellite (Jason, Topex/Poseidon, Geosat
Follow-On, ERS-2, Envisat) data maps of May-June 2010 processed by CCAR1,2
(Colorado Center for Astrodynamics Research), checked at Frascati
Laboratories by the means of the SHT congruent calculus3 and compared with
past years data, show for the first time a direct evidence of the rapid breaking
of the Loop Current, a warm ocean current, crucial part of the Gulf Stream.
As displayed both by the sea surface velocity maps and the sea surface height
maps, the Loop Current broke down for the first time around May 18th and
generated a clock wise eddy, which is still active
As of today the situation has deteriorated up to the point in which the eddy has
detached itself completely from the main stream therefore destroying
completely the Loop Current,

Since comparative analysis with past satellite data until may 2010 didn’t show
relevant anomalies, it might be therefore plausible to correlate the breaking of
the Loop Current with the biochemical and physical action of the BP Oil Spill on
the Gulf Stream.
It is reasonable to foresee the threat that the breaking of a crucial warm
stream as the Loop Current may generate a chain reaction of unpredictable
critical phenomena and instabilities due to strong non linearities which may
have serious consequences on the dynamics of the Gulf Stream thermoregulation
activity of the Global Climate.

More details are surfacing about why Blogetery.com, a blogging platform that claimed to service more than 70,000 blogs, was mysteriously booted from the Internet by its Web-hosting company.

The site was shut down after FBI agents informed executives of Burst.net, Blogetery’s Web host, late on July 9 that links to al-Qaeda materials were found on Blogetery’s servers, Joe Marr, chief technology officer for Burst.net, told CNET. Sources close to the investigation say that included in those materials were the names of American citizens targeted for assassination by al-Qaeda. Messages from Osama bin Laden and other leaders of the terrorist organization, as well as bomb-making tips, were also allegedly found on the server.
But Marr said a Burst.net employee erred in telling Blogetery’s operator and members of the media that the FBI had ordered it to terminate Blogetery’s service. He said Burst.net did that on its own.
This past weekend, reports surfaced that Blogetery was shut down by the federal government and suggested that it was likely due to copyright violations. On Sunday, CNET reported that the shutdown had nothing to do with copyright violations and that a similar service, Ipbfree.com, a platform for message boards, was shuttered within days of Blogetery. It is still unclear why Ipbfree was cut off.
The disappearance of the sites has prompted users of each service to complain about the closures and speculate about possible reasons. Some guesses were more wild than others.
“Make a Bomb in the Kitchen of Your Mom”
–from Al Qaeda Webzine
Many speculated that the FBI was using the Patriot Act to silence bloggers. But Marr emphasized that the FBI has never ordered Burst.net to stop service to any site it hosts without a court order and that the vast majority of Burst.net’s communication with the federal government has involved agents serving warrants related to terrorist or child porn investigations.
“They have to go through the legal system,” Marr said. “A judge has to issue an order.”
Marr said the FBI contacted Burst.net and sent a Voluntary Emergency Disclosure of Information request. The letter said terrorist material, which presented a threat to American lives, was found on a server hosted by Burst.net and asked for specific information about the people involved.
In the FBI’s letter, the agency included a clause that says Web hosts and Internet service providers may voluntarily elect to shut down the sites of customers involved in these kinds of situations. The Burst.net employee who handled the request erroneously believed that the FBI would want to seize the customer’s server and thus the employee cut off service to Blogetery. Marr said the FBI, however, never asked for the server.
Marr said that regardless of the mix-up, Blogetery’s service was terminated because bomb-making tips and a “hit list” are an obvious and absolute violation of its terms of service.
The FBI’s request invoked 18 USC 2702, a portion of federal law that allows providers to voluntarily disclose information to police in some circumstances.
Under this, the FBI has the right to ask that an Internet service provider to turn over information immediately–without being compelled by a court order–when the agency has reason to believe that lives may be threatened. The request also compels an ISP not to discuss the investigation.
A source with knowledge of the investigation said that the material allegedly found on Blogetery’s server is connected to an online magazine called “Inspire,” which debuted recently. Numerous news outlets reported over the past weekend that “Inspire” is designed to help recruit new members to al-Qaeda and is edited by Samir Khan, a 24-year-old North Carolina man who moved to Yemen last October. According to Fox News, the title of one article was “Make a Bomb in the Kitchen of Your Mom.”
Citing intelligence sources, Fox reported that Khan is Web savvy and his magazine represents “al-Qaeda’s most ambitious terrorist recruitment tool to date.”

Don’t be the white Daryl Lamont Jenkins. Don’t consign yourself to a lifetime of irrelevant posturing. Find something to do which will appeal to whites beyond ‘the scene’. Work on building local communities. Find ways to improve your own life. Engage in productive activism which carries good messages to whites who might otherwise be unaware.

That’s an easy prescription to make, but a hard one to put into practice. I blog precisely because my local community is not receptive to my message. If I could have these conversations with anyone I know in my local community, I would be hanging out in my local community, not blogging about everything from disruptive technologies to Jeffersonian notions of race.

This blog wanders all over the map. While I am sympathetic to the ethnic interests of the European gene pool, I am not going to blog as an advocate of Ethnic Genetic Interests. I am childless and have no prospects for fertile marriage; thus, as Greg Johnson has explained, I should not position myself as a leader in the cause of EGI.
http://www.counter-currents.com/2010/07/is-racial-purism-decadent/

Likewise, I am a Jeffersonian, but Jeffersonian thought is an impractical philosophy, not a practical system of politics. At best, the Jeffersonian can point to a host of errors in modern politics and demand that these errors be admitted. As long as the masses are asleep to such injustices, there can be no practical Jeffersonian politics.

However, the redoubtable Kievsky gave me an encouraging thought:

”Multiculturalism is very expensive, high maintenance social engineering. It will fail when they can’t pay for it any more.”

Further, someone called HelenChicago asked:

“When do you expect this to occur? Within our lifetimes, or more than a century in the future?”

The careful pundits, e.g. John Robb and Pat Lang, tend to hedge their predictions as possibilities.

Less cautious doomsayers have predicted doom by 2 August 2010, and this blog is scheduled to keep up with developments on that story.

When will the Big Change Come?

I think the key issue is the strength of the USA dollar. As long as the USA dollar is strong enough to be used for reserve currency, the current geopolitical situation will probably persist.

When the USA dollar has some kind of international crisis – then there will be sudden change.

Here are some possible crises:
a) US dollar hyperinflates; US residents panic and cannot buy food.
b) US defaults on debts and fails to conceal it; markets panic.
c) China suddenly refuses to buy more US bonds; markets panic.

Here are some possible non-crisis turning points:
d) US defaults on debts but successfully conceals default; markets stagger along.
e) China buys fewer bonds but US has time to adjust; business as usual.
f) US cuts entitlements but conceals cuts; US residents blame each other.

Because a,b, and c would destabilize the US, the Powers That Be will expend a lot of resources to push for non-crisis alternatives such as d, e, and f.

Forecasting rationally predictable disruptions is important, and I plan to blog a lot about exactly that topic. But recall that there are also black swans, unpredicted disruptions, and those can have a lot more impact because it’s harder to prepare for them.

Update: Unnamed “USA officials” have recently claimed that this scientist was a mole working for the CIA.

An Iranian scientist who says he was abducted and taken to the United States by the CIA returned to Tehran yesterday to a hero’s welcome and claimed that he had been pressured into lying about his country’s nuclear programme.

Shahram Amiri said that he was on the hajj pilgrimage when he was seized at gunpoint in the city of Medina, drugged and taken to the US, where he says Israel was involved in his interrogation. In the US, officials were reported to have admitted that Mr Amiri was paid more than $5m (£3.2m) by the CIA for information about Iran’s nuclear ambitions.

The US claims to have received useful information from him in return for the money, but is clearly embarrassed by his very public return to Iran. The offer of a large bribe is reportedly part of a special US programme to get Iranian nuclear scientists to defect.

Flashing a victory sign, Mr Amiri returned to Tehran International Airport to be greeted by senior officials and by his tearful wife and seven-year-old son, whom he had not seen since he disappeared in Saudi Arabia during a visit 14 months ago. Iran said it was demanding information about what had happened to him.

The US says that he entered the US of his own free will and had relocated to Tucson, Arizona. The US is claiming that Mr Amiri, who had worked for Iran’s Atomic Energy Organisation, re-defected because pressure was placed on his family back in Iran, something he denied yesterday. Officials suggested that Iran had used his family to get him to leave the US.

“Americans wanted me to say that I defected to America of my own will, to use me for revealing some false information about Iran’s nuclear work,” Mr Amiri said at Tehran airport.

“I was under intensive psychological pressure by [the] CIA… the main aim of this abduction was to stage a new political and psychological game against Iran.”

Iran and the US have been engaged in a semi-covert war involving defections, seizures and kidnappings in recent years, of which the case of Mr Amiri is only the latest example.

It reached its peak in Iraq in 2007 when the US abducted Iranian consular officials from the northern city of Arbil and Iran seized a British navy patrol boat in the Gulf. Last year, Iran seized three Americans hiking in the mountains of Iraqi Kurdistan, claiming they had strayed over the Iranian border, while other accounts said they had been forced into Iran at gunpoint.

Mr Amiri had appeared in three contradictory videos; in the first he claimed to have been kidnapped and tortured and in the second, he said he had come to the US to write his PhD.

In a third video he denounces the second one. On Monday he arrived unannounced at the Iranian interest section of the Pakistani embassy in Washington and asked for an air ticket to return to Iran.

At his press conference at Tehran airport, Mr Amiri stressed that he had acted under compulsion. “Israeli agents were present at some of my interrogation sessions and I was threatened to be handed over to Israel if I refused to cooperate with Americans,” he said. “I have some documents proving that I’ve not been free in the United States and have always been under the control of armed agents of US intelligence services.”

He says he was offered $50m to stay in the US. Mr Amiri denied that he had ever had any information about the Iranian nuclear programme. “I am an ordinary researcher… I have never made nuclear-related researches. I’m not involved in any confidential jobs. I had no classified information.”

Mr Amiri had worked at Iran’s Malek Ashtar University, an institution closely connected to the country’s elite Revolutionary Guards.

US officials said that Mr Amiri may not be able to access his $5m, because of sanctions on Iran. The Washington Post said yesterday that the Iranian scientist had been working with the CIA for a year and officials were “stunned” by his request to go home this week. The officials added that he had provided useful information, though not directly on whether Iran was trying to make a nuclear device.

It is very easy and safe to talk about what “might” happen. When one gets overtaken by events, one can always defend one’s claim by reminding the reader it was stated as a possibility, not a certainty.

John Kaminski passes along some predictions. Perhaps they were intended as possibilities, but Kaminski seems to be stating them as certainties, so I will hold Kaminski to these predictions. (If they come true, the world will be such a shambles that there might be no way to reward Kaminski, however.)
http://johnkaminski.info/

1. Hints of the growth of the radioactive context are connected to the impending Israeli attack on Iran. Some of these associations indicate a “glazed” (radioactive) “sheet” over the four major cities in Israel.

So if Israel hasn’t been nuked into a glazed sheet by the end of 2011, this will have proven false.

2. a ‘crescendo period’” from the oil volcano will begin in early August and produce significant negative effects and personal agony for those who live near the Gulf of Mexico. “The accrual patterns” (of the data) “continue to point to an earthquake” (no more than 19 months away) that will finally stop the flow of oil in the Gulf of Mexico. “In the meantime of flowing and blowing oil, the Terra entity data indicates other volcanoes and earthquakes, causing drinking water problems everywhere before a mainstream news blackout on this information is invoked in September. But because of great earthquakes in the summer and fall of 2010, the public won’t stand for the blackout.

Verification that of earthquake involvement in the final stoppage will require a geologist. No doubt many geologists will be eager to comment when the oil finally does stop.

3. … also predicts revenge assassinations by “unbalanced persons” will begin in September, aimed at those who are thought to be murdering the Earth.

If no assassinations are reported by October, this can probably be regarded as false. I suppose a news blackout might work for a while, but I suspect the news would leak.

4. Some 1.289+ billion people will perish as a direct result of the ill winds and the oil volcano, the Alta report states. One aspect of these “ill winds” is that “in at least one instance they will be so dense and heavy” that they will create a lake of death air at the base of a mountain range. “This lake of death air has a major highway that comes over mountains and descends into an area currently lush with plants. All plant and animal life of this region will also die, along with many humans who will either be trapped in the lake of death air or will unwittingly travel into it. Further the data show the heavy death air is so toxic that even worms will perish under it. This is but a single instance of thousands of detail layers about the ill winds and their effects on the planet.” “The ill winds sub sets and their cross links continue to build support for a huge diaspora crossing great river systems and fleeing north within the continental USA.” The data sets within the Populace/USofA entity show that the diaspora will be chaotic, and many tens of thousands will die in the process. These ill winds will grow considerably through the “torment of August, and then get a spike of new growth that nearly doubles the emotional sums of the diaspora sub set in mid October.” By August, High writes, everyone will be focused on the poisoning of the air rather than the oil in the water, as is the case at the time of this writing.

If, by the start of September, there have been no reports of ultra-lethal gas clouds, this will have proven false.

5. Sinkholes also figure prominently in the Alta report’s calculations, which focus on a very large commercial public building that will disappear in a heartbeat, with a devastating quickness that panics the populace into abandoning the whole city. In addition, the national infrastructure will be significantly affected. The sudden appearance of large holes in many parts of the world will destroy the connections that enable the Internet and television to work. The Alta report also predicts the West Coast of the U.S., and Central Asia (the ‘stans’ and western China) will be especially hard hit by “damaging temblors” and also unprecedented “strange wave form earthquakes.” High writes, “These strange wave form earthquakes are described in language that does make them seem quite bizarre in that the details suggest a slow moving waves” will last for days, leaving visible traces in hard ground, roadways and stone.

This should be easy to falsify or verify.

6. the reaction of the populace both personally and en masse to the cessation of the big lie, and the exposure to facts is noted as being so severe that suicides and murders will result.

This one might be tough to verify unless the suicide notes specifically mention the end of the big lie.

7. a “long night of the soul” during the first 12 days of August, as well as a “bad summer”, illness and loss of the money in the fall, all leading to “a November tipping point.” There are data sets around “the 12 days of torment” in early August indicating that the “Israeli mistake will ratchet up militarily” over late July and through August. July 26 seems to be the starting point.

This is supposed to start in just nine days. While the prediction is vague, the time slot from 26 July to 12 August is tightly defined. Anything that ties the first twelve days of August together would be a confirmation, but its hard to imagine a news story about a “night of the soul” that lasts for twelve continuous days. Israel is always ratcheting up the tension, so that alone would not confirm.

8. “The huge levels of growth for the [massive unemployment wave] within the populace of the U.S. over the summer are pointing toward the early August period as being very key to the subsequent developments within this meme as well as the tipping point of November. The idea coming across is that the currency woes of July will build to a crisis point of insurmountable proportions by August 1, and that the crushing economic reality will come shining through for all to see.

1 August 2010 is a Sunday, so any crisis on that Sunday should be obvious by 2 August 2010. Memo to myself – schedule a post for that date to check back on these predictions.

9. The trend in governments crushed by hyperinflation will lead to dictatorships on three continents. These dictatorships will be a final sign of the death of the dollar (and other paper debt based currencies], though the aware observer will certainly note the earlier signs to be found in Summer.

Dictatorship is a very specific form of government. Dictatorship resulting from hyperinflation is even more specific. This should be easy to verify. However, the real story would be the dollar hyperinflation – people wouldn’t care so much about dictatorship if the dollar was still the reserve currency.

10. The ambitious manipulations of the Israelis will result in massive protests against the Israeli propagandists in the TV business. The result of these will be White House suicides and terminations.

White House terminations and suicides should be easy to confirm. I have trouble imagining “massive protests” against the TV business in the USA, but the prediction might apply to “massive protests” anywhere on earth.

11. “Further there were some additional details in previous reports describing rain systems that would deliver years of rains in only hours or days. “Other extreme weather caused problems are indicated for both Central Europe as well as Central and South America. Again, in both cases, flooding will play a crucial role in the inducing of crop failure… “This deluge in Europe will be so totally out of place and out of time as to be mentally affecting the regional populace, many of whom will be looking to the darkness at noon wondering what has caused this night-during-day event.

This should be easy to verify. It will be false if there is no freak rain big enough to deliver a year’s worth of rain in a matter of days – by the end of 2011.

12. …it now appears that this central bank assault incident will be the source of the song of revolution that had been previously forecast for Fall/Winter of 2010. The execution of the head bankster(s) will be visible within the planetary press including the propagandists here in the USofA, and is also indicated to spark a series of bombings, and immolation (from above) across the globe as disenfranchised and bankrupt victims of the cabal of banksters act out their own plots and revenge scenarios. The data sets are indicating that a particularly nasty bit of revenge tactic will become known as a bankster’s circumcision. The details are horrific, but suffice it to say that garden implements are involved, and that the actual target will be for castration such that banksters may not breed. There are data elements within these sets pointing to a three way battle as the banksters are set against their traditional allies, the organized crime families.

“Execution visible in the press” might mean any kind of killing – e.g. by bomb – it wouldn’t have to be an electric chair.

Okay – the first signs should be visible by 2 August 2010 – this post should be updated then.